Adams, James Hopkins (15 March 1812–13 July 1861), planter and politician, was born in Richland District, South Carolina, the son of Henry Walker Adams and Mary Goodwyn, planters. At an early age, both of his parents died and James was placed in the care of his maternal grandfather, an early settler of South Carolina from Virginia. Prosperous, his grandfather, a plantation owner, was able to raise Adams in an atmosphere of wealth and education. Shortly after his graduation from Yale in 1831, Adams married Jane Margaret Scott, with whom he had eleven children....
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Adams, James Hopkins (1812-1861), planter and politician
Ronald W. Fischer
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Aiken, D. Wyatt (1828-1887), agricultural editor and congressman
William L. Barney
Aiken, D. Wyatt (17 March 1828–06 April 1887), agricultural editor and congressman, was born David Wyatt Aiken in Winnsboro, South Carolina, the son of David Aiken, a merchant and planter, and Nancy Kerr. Descended from an Irish family that had prospered in the United States, Aiken received an excellent education at Mount Zion Institute in his hometown and, as was common for the sons of planters, attended South Carolina College. He graduated in 1849 and taught mathematics for two years at Mount Zion. After traveling to Europe in 1851, he returned home to marry Mattie Gaillard in 1852. Before her death in 1855, they had two children. Aiken married Virginia Carolina Smith in 1857; they had eleven children. The following year he purchased a plantation from the estate of Virginia’s father in Cokesbury, Abbeville District. As the proprietor of “Coronaca” plantation, he became involved in the agricultural reform movement and in states’ rights politics. He fervently believed that “agriculture climbs high in the scale of science: it develops thought, matures judgment, and requires for the execution, untiring energy, perseverance, and industry.” He was instrumental in the formation of the Abbeville Agricultural Society and was a member of its executive committee. In 1858 he attended the Southern Commercial Convention in Montgomery, Alabama, a meeting that quickly became a forum for disunionist politics....
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Aiken, George David (20 August 1892–19 November 1984), farmer and U.S. senator
Donald R. McCoy
Aiken, George David (20 August 1892–19 November 1984), farmer and U.S. senator, was born in Dummerston, Vermont, the son of Edward W. Aiken and Myra Cook, farmers. He attended high school in Brattleboro. In 1914 he married Beatrice M. Howard; they had four children. His first wife died in 1966, and a year later Aiken married one of his Senate aides, Lola Pierotti....
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Aiken, George David (20 August 1892–19 November 1984)
Maker: Clara Sipprell
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George David Aiken (20 August 1892–19 November 1984), by Clara Sipprell, c. 1960
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; bequest of Phyllis Fenner
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Aiken, William (1806-1887), planter and congressman
James M. Clifton
Aiken, William (28 January 1806–06 September 1887), planter and congressman, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, the son of William Aiken, Sr., an Irish immigrant, and Henrietta Wyatt. At the time of his death, the elder Aiken was president of the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company and a wealthy merchant. Aiken attended the South Carolina College, from which he graduated in 1825. He then traveled to Europe. Upon returning to Charleston, he married Harriet Lowndes in 1831. They had one child....
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Alden, John (1599?–12 September 1687), farmer and magistrate
Mark A. Peterson
Alden, John (1599?–12 September 1687), farmer and magistrate, was one of the original settlers of Plymouth Colony, arriving in New England on the Mayflower in 1620. No definite information exists about his birth, parentage, childhood, or education. In 1620 he lived at Southampton, England, where the migrating Pilgrims stopped for provisions on their way from the Netherlands to the New World. There he was hired as the ship’s cooper in charge of its supply of beer and drinking water. Upon landfall, Alden joined in signing the now famous Mayflower Compact. After the colonists’ arrival in Plymouth, Governor ...
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Allen, Edward Tyson (1875-1942), forester and conservationist
Veronica June Bruce
Allen, Edward Tyson (26 December 1875–27 May 1942), forester and conservationist, was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of Oscar Dana Allen, a professor of analytical chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale, and Fidelia Roberts Totman. Educated in the public schools and privately by his father, Allen moved with his family first to California and later to Washington State, where they lived near Mount Rainier. He began work as a reporter for the ...
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Allerton, Samuel Waters (1828-1914), meat packer
Leslie V. Tischauser
Allerton, Samuel Waters (26 May 1828–22 February 1914), meat packer, was born in Amenia, New York, the son of Samuel Waters Allerton, Sr., a tailor and woolen mill operator, and Hannah Hurd. The youngest of nine children, he attended school for several years but received little formal education beyond that. The family experienced financial difficulties as a result of the 1837 panic and was forced to move several times, once as far west as Dubuque, Iowa, before settling on a farm in upstate New York in 1842. Eight years later Samuel and his older brother Henry rented a farm in Yates County and began raising and trading cattle and hogs. Shortly thereafter they bought a farm in Wayne County....
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Allston, Robert Francis Withers (1801-1864), planter and statesman
James M. Clifton
Allston, Robert Francis Withers (21 April 1801–07 April 1864), planter and statesman, was born on “Hagley Plantation” in All Saints Parish (Georgetown District), South Carolina, the son of Benjamin Allston, a planter, and Charlotte Anne Allston. Allston entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, in December 1817 and graduated tenth in his class on 1 July 1821. Appointed lieutenant in the Third Artillery and assigned to the Coast Survey, he participated in the surveying of the harbors at Plymouth and Provincetown, Massachusetts, and of the entrance to Mobile Bay. He resigned his commission on 1 February 1822 in response to his widowed mother’s plea for help on their plantations and returned to South Carolina, where he remained a rice planter for the rest of his life. As a planter, however, he continued his interest in civil engineering and in 1823 was elected to the first of two terms as surveyor general of South Carolina. In 1832 he married Adele Petigru, sister of Unionist ...
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Alston, Joseph (1779-1816), planter and statesman
James M. Clifton
Alston, Joseph (1779–10 September 1816), planter and statesman, was born in All Saints Parish (Georgetown District), South Carolina, the son of Colonel William Alston, a rice planter, and Mary Ashe. He attended the College of Charleston from 1793 to 1794, then entered Princeton in 1795, his junior year, but he withdrew without graduating. He read law in the office of ...
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Alston, William (1757-1839), planter and legislator
James M. Clifton
Alston, William (1757–26 June 1839), planter and legislator, was born in All Saints Parish (Georgetown District), South Carolina, the son of Joseph Allston and Charlotte Rothmaler, planters. He became the first of the Allston family to spell his surname with a single l...
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Armsby, Henry Prentiss (1853-1921), agricultural chemist
Richard A. Hawkins
Armsby, Henry Prentiss (21 September 1853–19 October 1921), agricultural chemist, was born in Northbridge, Massachusetts, the son of Lewis Armsby, an artisan and cabinetmaker, and Mary A. Prentiss. He attended the common schools of Whitinsville and Millbury and was interested in chemical experiments from an early age. Armsby graduated in 1871 with a B.S. from Worcester County Free Institute of Industrial Science (later Worcester Polytechnic Institute), where he was subsequently an instructor in chemistry from 1871 to 1872. As a postgraduate he specialized in analytical chemistry and spent two periods at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School, from which he received a Ph.B. in 1874 and a Ph.D. in 1879. In the meantime, and after a year as a teacher at Fitchburg High School in Massachusetts, he had gone to Germany in 1875 to study animal nutrition with the University of Leipzig’s leading agricultural scientists and with Julius Kühn and his colleagues at nearby Möckern Agricultural Experiment Station, Germany’s oldest agricultural experiment station. It was there that Emil von Wolff had begun his pioneering research into agricultural chemistry in 1851....
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Babcock, Stephen Moulton (1843-1931), agricultural chemist
Albert B. Costa
Babcock, Stephen Moulton (22 October 1843–01 July 1931), agricultural chemist, was born near Bridgewater, New York, the son of Pelig Brown Babcock and Cornelia Scott, farmers. Babcock worked from childhood on the family farm. His inquisitive mind attracted him to science, and he enrolled in Tufts College, obtaining a bachelor’s degree in 1866. He began engineering studies at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute but returned to the farm after the death of his father. In 1872 he was a student of chemistry at Cornell University and in 1875 an instructor of chemistry. In 1877 he began graduate studies at the University of Göttingen. After receiving a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1879, he resumed his Cornell instructorship. In 1882 he became chief chemist at the newly founded New York Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, New York. During his six years there he devised several methods of analysis for food materials....
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Bailey, Liberty Hyde (1858-1954), horticulturist and botanist
Eleanor F. Wedge
Bailey, Liberty Hyde (15 March 1858–25 December 1954), horticulturist and botanist, was born near South Haven, in Van Buren County, Michigan, the son of Liberty Hyde Bailey, Sr., a farmer and fruit grower, and Sarah Harrison. From childhood he was interested in nature, observing and making collections of plants and animals in the fields near his home. During his school days he came upon copies of Charles Darwin’s ...
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Bailey, Liberty Hyde (1858-1954)
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Liberty Hyde Bailey Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-12222).
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Baker, Hugh Potter (1878-1950), forester and university administrator
Edward L. Lach, Jr.
Baker, Hugh Potter (20 January 1878–24 May 1950), forester and university administrator, was born in St. Croix Falls, Polk County, Wisconsin, the son of Joseph Stannard Baker, a land agent, and Alice Potter. His father was financially successful, and Baker grew up in surroundings that were physically comfortable and culture-filled. Both of his parents having attended college, Baker received his early schooling locally before entering Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he remained a year before transferring to Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University). He graduated with a B.S. in 1901, having also begun work in partnership with his brother, Fred Baker, in a part-time position at the federal Division of Forestry. This division, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was then run by pioneer forester and future governor of Pennsylvania ...
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Banneker, Benjamin (1731-1806), farmer and astronomer
Silvio A. Bedini
Banneker, Benjamin (09 November 1731–19 October 1806), farmer and astronomer, was born near the Patapsco River in Baltimore County in what became the community of Oella, Maryland, the son of Robert, a freed slave, and Mary Banneky, a daughter of a freed slave named Bannka and Molly Welsh, a freed English indentured servant who had been transported to Maryland. Banneker was taught by his white grandmother to read and write from a Bible. He had no formal education other than a brief attendance at a Quaker one-room school during winter months. He was a voracious reader, informing himself in his spare time in literature, history, religion, and mathematics with whatever books he could borrow. From an early age he demonstrated a talent for mathematics and for creating and solving mathematical puzzles. With his three sisters he grew up on his father’s tobacco farm, and for the rest of his life Banneker continued to live in a log house built by his father....
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Barbour, James (1775-1842), planter and politician
Charles D. Lowery
Barbour, James (10 June 1775–07 June 1842), planter and politician, was born in Orange County, Virginia, the son of Thomas Barbour, a wealthy planter, and Mary Pendleton Thomas. Because his family suffered financial reverses during the Revolution, Barbour did not receive a college education. After preparatory study in rhetoric and the classics at a local academy, he apprenticed himself to a Richmond lawyer. In 1793, when he was only eighteen years old, he was admitted to the Virginia bar and began practicing law in Orange and neighboring counties. Two years later he married Lucy Johnson, daughter of a prominent local planter. They established a country seat at “Barboursville,” near Montpelier, where they raised five children....
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Barbour, James (1775-1842)
Maker: Charles Févret de Saint-Mémin
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James Barbour. Engraving of a portrait by Charles Févret de Saint-Mémin, 1801. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-105897).
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Barrett, Charles Simon (1866-1935), agricultural leader
Judy Barrett Litoff
Barrett, Charles Simon (28 January 1866–04 April 1935), agricultural leader, was born in Pike County, Georgia, the son of Thomas Jefferson Barrett, a prominent farmer and politician, and Minerva Slade. Attending local schools only during winter, he spent his early years working on the family farm, where he developed his lifelong devotion to agriculture. After attending normal schools in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Lebanon, Ohio, and Valparaiso, Indiana, Barrett returned to his childhood home in Georgia. In 1891 he married Alma Rucker, a schoolteacher. The newlyweds settled in Upson County, Georgia, and opened a “literary school” for local children. For the next fourteen years, the Barretts devoted themselves to teaching, farming, and raising six sons....
